Archive for April, 2010

April 10th, 2010

For my sins, I guess, I’m a member of the Berkeley faculty Committee on Courses of Instruction. Things are looking up for this gig, though, because there’s growing interest on campus and at the university level in online instruction, and the committee is starting to seriously deliberate this very interesting issue.  Not surprisingly, I guess, [...]

April 10th, 2010

Historical snapshot: Cardinal Ratzinger slow-walks a child molestation casethe

April 10th, 2010

If the Sinaloa group is winning the war, then the Sinaloa group should get the bulk of the enforcement attention.

April 9th, 2010

The University of California is trying to cut costs.  The Berkeley campus, for example, hired Bain & Co. for $3m (your tax dollars at work) to find savings. The project is called Achieving Operational Excellence, perhaps because absolutely nothing beyond the home-page blurb seems to  have anything to do with it; the words value, excellence [...]

April 9th, 2010

The treaty Barack Obama just signed with Dmitri Medvedev, and the strategy statement that went with it, are impeccably sensible. Fox News runs footage of mushroom cloulds while Newt Gingrich lies through his teeth about what’s in the statement. The mainstream media sits on its hands, and only Jon Stewart does the job of an actual journalist.

April 9th, 2010

ACA’s “mandates” revisited: fallacies of choice and honesty about benefits.

April 9th, 2010

Cory Booker would be the ideal Obama nominee for the Supreme Court.

April 8th, 2010

James’ post about the Oxford Circus redesign fails to distinguish three very different ideas about managing movement in urban spaces, though if you follow his links you can parse it out. The culture of traffic engineering is about moving cars (in parts of Europe, bicycles and trams also) quickly, and one of its tropes – [...]

April 8th, 2010

Logically, there’s no difference between supporting the Affordable Care Act and opposing repeal. But rhetorically, there’s all the difference in the world.

April 8th, 2010

Yes, it’s satire. But on this one, The Onion’s similarity to The New York Times is genuinely disturbing.